the "proper" way to identify the bitness of your kernel and CPU

[Sharpe, Sam J]

2009/4/3 Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca>:
> On Fri, 3 Apr 2009, Sharpe, Sam J wrote:
>
>> [sam at machine ~]$ [[ $(grep lm /proc/cpuinfo) ]] && echo x86_64 || echo i686
>> x86_64 (this represents the processor architecture)
>
>  and your opinion of
>
>  $ getconf LONG_BIT
>
> i'm guessing that is equally informative, yes?

Apparently not, but I didn't know this until I did a bit of
reading/experimenting.

Take my example machine before which has a 64bit capable CPU but a 32bit OS:
[sam at machine ~]$ getconf LONG_BIT
32

As you can see, it printing the kernel architecture, not a property of
the CPU. I think /proc/cpuinfo is always the right place to look,
because getconf reports only on kernel properties.

--
Sam